“The god did, yes,” the [Cleric] replied. “Adonite appears as a male when he appears as a halfling.”
“Huh,” Otonia grunted through [Belly Speech]. “I probably should have known that.”
“Shouldn’t you be a little more weirded out about this?” Krateros directed back to the visitor.
“About what?”
“You’re talking to two [Otters]. I would think that’s weird enough.”
The [Cleric] appeared genuinely puzzled. “I have a quest from Adonite. He is not a trickster and I take his work very seriously. And in any event, it is a System-monitored Quest that is now showing as completed. Why would I be weirded out?”
The two [Otters] exchanged looks, then thoughts and a few hand gestures to boot. Turning back to the halfling, “Well, if you wouldn’t mind entertaining the question: Where the heck are we?”
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The [Cleric] confirmed that the two were far upstream of a river that emptied into the Slane Sea, around which most of the Slanemore continent wrapped around. It was a heavily forested area fifty kilometers in all directions, with only a few isolated villages nearby that engaged in various bushcraft. With that, the [Brillian] bid them goodbye, and the pair were alone again.
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After another complicated and over-exaggerated sex check, Otonia was renamed Cora ◐ and Krateros was renamed Dips ◮, with the System accepting both as their names.
Summer faded into autumn. The pair leveled defending the [Otters’] habitat from common predators: various large snakes, big cats, and the occasional bird of prey. As they did so, they slowly began stretching out their skills with true magic. In so doing, they quickly discovered a few things about XP and the system.
The first was that the Fell standard unit of experience, the hecate, was exactly the same as 1 point of XP. So that kept shit simple.
The second was that they were gaining experience at an atrocious rate compared to Fell. After close observation and experimentation, they found that the experience was being formed within their souls, but was swiftly being drained off, presumably by the System. That at least was consistent with the Fell’s telling of history.
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As a close corollary to the second point, it meant that most Fell were gaining twelve to twenty thousand XP per year, around sixteen times what most of the sapient Races under the System gained (present company excluded). This extreme harvest explained in part why the System could tweak the XP multipliers significantly without necessarily being a drain on the XP already in the System: it simply would take less XP.
As a test on this point, they trekked for a few days to find a high level opponent. As with their prior experiences power-leveling, the XP multipliers were so high that, under the System’s own accounting, the duo should earn more XP than was actually formed within their own souls. And, indeed, the pair found that the System would actually imbue into them that extra XP.
The third point they found was that once they committed XP to level up, they could no longer draw upon that XP to fuel true magic. Curiously, they had trouble tracking where exactly the XP went for quite a while.
It took until the middle of winter, when the river had partially frosted over, that they found the answer.
Cora ◐ was meditating, closely observing her soul and her experience while fussing about with her Status, when Dips ◮ came to sit across from her. When Cora finally opened her eyes, they were glazed over, staring off into the middle-distance. She leaned over and started staring through the ground, slowly crawling about on her belly, tail nub up in the air. Suddenly, Cora leapt up, jumping onto and pinning down Dips, staring deep into his soul. Dips could just faintly make out the workings of true magic around Cora’s eyes, but…
Cora sighed, as she rolled off of him.
Krateros pondered that for a moment.
Another sigh. She waved a hand at the ground.
She waved at her own body.
Cora raised an [Otter] eyebrow at that.
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